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Founded by Alibaba Group on May 10, 2003, Taobao Marketplace facilitates consumer-to-consumer (C2C) retail by providing a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online stores that mainly cater to consumers in China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.^[3]
With around 760 million product listings as of March 2013, Taobao Marketplace is one of the world’s top 10 most visited websites according to Alexa.^[4] For the year ended March 31, 2013, the combined gross merchandise volume (GMV) of Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com exceeded 1 trillion yuan.^[5]
Sellers are able to post goods for sale either through a fixed price or auction. Auctions make up a small percentage of transactions. The majority of the products are new merchandise sold at fixed prices. Buyers can assess seller backgrounds by information available on the site, including ratings, comments and complaints.

History

Taobao Marketplace (formerly "Taobao") was launched in May 2003 by Alibaba after eBay acquired Eachnet, China’s online auction leader at the time, for USD 180 million and became a major player in the Chinese consumer e-commerce market.^[6] To counter eBay’s expansion, Taobao offered free listings to sellers and introduced website features designed to act in local consumers' best interests, such as instant messaging for facilitating buyer-seller communication and an escrow-based payment tool, Alipay. As a result, Taobao became mainland China's undisputed market leader within two years. Its market share surged from 8% to 59% between 2003 and 2005, while eBay China plunged from 79% to 36%.^[7] EBay shut down its China site in 2006.
In April 2008, Taobao introduced a newly dedicated B2C platform called Taobao Mall to complement its C2C marketplace. Taobao Mall established itself as the destination for quality brand name goods for Chinese consumers. Taobao Mall launched an independent web domain, Tmall.com, and enhanced its focus on product verticals and improvements in shopping experience in November 2010. It became an independent business in June 2011 and changed its Chinese name to Tian Mao (Tmall) in January 2012. As of October 2013 it was the eighth most visited web site in China.^[8]
In 2008, Taobao fueled the overall growth of the Chinese online shopping industry through execution of the “Big Taobao” strategy with the aim of becoming a provider of e-commerce infrastructure services for all e-commerce market participants.
In October 2010, Taobao beta launched eTao as an independent searching engine for online shopping, providing product and merchant information from a number of major consumer e-commerce websites in China. Online shoppers can use the site to compare prices from different sellers and identify products to buy. According to the Alibaba Group web site, eTao offers products from Amazon China, Dangdang, Gome, Yihaodian, Nike China and Vancl, as well as Taobao and Tmall.^[5]
In May 2011, Alibaba Group opened a retail store in Beijing under the Taobao Mall brand. The five-story 25,000sqm Taobao Mall iFengChao Furniture Showroom^[9] opened as a complement to their online stores.
In June 2011, Alibaba Group Executive Chairman and former CEO Jack Ma announced that Taobao would split into three different companies: Taobao Marketplace (a C2C platform), Tmall.com (a B2C platform; then called Taobao Mall), and eTao (a search engine for online shopping). The move was said to be necessary for Taobao to “meet competitive threats that emerged in the past two years during which the Internet and e-commerce landscape has changed dramatically.”^[10]
From 2012 onward, Taobao began to accept international Visa and MasterCard credit cards;^[11] prior, only domestic banks were supported by AliPay.^[12]
On April 29, 2013, Alibaba announced an investment of USD 586 million in Sina Weibo. According to Reuters, the deal “should drive more web traffic to Alibaba's Taobao Marketplace, China's largest e-commerce website with a consumer focus.”^[13] On August 1, 2013, Alibaba launched Weibo for Taobao, which allows users to link Sina Weibo accounts with Taobao accounts.^[14]

Services and features

Tmall.com

Tmall.com offers a shopping experience for increasingly affluent Chinese consumers that offers them the opportunity to buy Western brands. According to the Alibaba Group web site, these brands include UNIQLO, L’Oréal, adidas, P&G, Unilever, Gap, Ray-Ban, Nike and Levi's). Again, according to the Alibaba Group site, Tmall.com and Taobao Marketplace set a record for highest single-day transaction volume during a special promotion on November 11, 2012, facilitating the sales of goods totaling RMB19.1 billion on the day. For the year ended March 31, 2013, the company claimed that combined gross merchandise volume (GMV) of the two platforms exceeded RMB1 trillion.^[5]

Mascot

Taobao’s mascot is an ant, which represents their corporate culture. Ma introduced Taobao to the outside world by stating, "We are the ant army." Ma once organized more than 2,000 employees at a gymnasium to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the founding ceremony. At the party, Taobao employees waved the Taobao mascot — the flag of "ants." At the end of the celebration that lasted for four hours, all the employees stood hand-in-hand, singing "If you do not experience wind and rain, you cannot see the rainbow. The ants that be organized together can beat the elephant."

Shop feedback

To thoroughly investigate a Taobao shop, a good way is to view its feedback by clicking the shop's rating icon. For Tmall.com shops, people click the stars to view their ratings. Taobao users usually spend time to read feedback and compare items of one shop with those of others.^[15]

Alipay

Launched in 2004, Alipay (simplified Chinese: 支付宝; traditional Chinese: 支付寶; pinyin: Zhīfùbǎo), an escrow-based online payment platform, is the preferred payment solution for transactions on Taobao Marketplace. It is the most widely used third-party online payment solution in China.^[16] To ensure safe transactions, Alipay uses an escrow system through which payment is only released to the seller once the buyer has received his or her goods in satisfactory condition.
According to the Alibaba Group web site, Alipay is partnered with multiple financial institutions as well as Visa and MasterCard to facilitate payments in China and abroad.^[5]

AliWangWang (TradeManager)

A distinctive feature of shopping on Taobao Marketplace is the ease of communication between buyer and seller prior to the purchase through its embedded proprietary instant chat program, named AliWangWang (Chinese: 阿里旺旺; pinyin: ĀlǐWàngWàng). It has become a habit among Chinese online shoppers to interact with the sellers through AliWangWang to inquire about products and to bargain prior to purchasing products.

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A peeler (potato peeler or vegetable peeler) is a kitchen tool consisting of a slotted metal blade attached to a handle, that is used to remove the outer skin or peel of certain vegetables, frequently potatoes and carrots, and fruits such as apples, pears, etc. A paring knife may also be used to peel vegetables. A peeler differs from a knife in that the blade has a slot cut into it, which is sharpened on the inside edge, while the other side prevents the blade from cutting too far into the vegetable.

Overview

There are numerous designs of peelers used today. Most handheld peelers are either straight or Y-type, while the particular designs vary depending on region and personal preference.

Straight peelers

A French Econome peeler

A straight peeler has the blade parallel to the handle, resembling a knife. The blade may be fixed or pivoting. The Lancashire and French Econome designs contain a fixed blade which does not pivot. The Lancashire often has a round wooden handle wrapped in string, and is often single edged, though there are dual edged variants. The Econome has a unique blade design with two slits.

Swivel peelers

Swivel peelers have the blade mounted on a pivot. Thus the angle of the blade is self-adjusted as pressure is applied, increasing ease of use.
The Jonas peeler, designed in Sweden in 1953, is a straight design with a pivoting blade attached to the end of an oblong metal loop handle, which is held like a knife. A shaft runs through the length of the handle. The blade has two edges to enable use in either direction, and by either hand. While often copied, the original is still made by Linden Sweden. For many decades, it has been the standard type of peeler in the United States.

Y peelers

A fixed blade Y peeler common in China

A Y peeler or speed peeler has a blade perpendicular to its handle, a design closely resembling a safety razor. It is used with a similar action to a razor, shaving off skin in strips parallel to the handle. Most speed peelers have an 'eye gouger' beside the blade, a loop of metal used to dig out eyes and blemishes from the potato.
A particularly famous example of this variety is the Zena Rex peeler, invented in 1947 by Alfred Neweczerzal of Davos, Switzerland. Considered an icon of Swiss design, it was featured on a 2004 Swiss postage stamp.^[1] It has a one piece aluminum handle and a pivoting carbon steel blade with dual edges. The stainless steel handled variant, the Zena Star peeler, was the model popularized by legendary New York City street hawker Joe Ades.

A mechanical apple peeler is a crank operated device that peels apples and optionally cores and slices them in one motion. When the slicer is enabled it cuts a normal apple into a helical shape. It is designed to work on apples but will also peel a number of other fruits and vegetables such as pears, beetroot, potatoes, cucumbers and thick carrots.

Industrial peelers

In an industrial setting, potatoes may be peeled using steam jets to loosen the surface skin, followed by a dry abrasion peeler, and brushes and water sprays.^[2] The process may also involve treatment with lye to soften the outer skin. One type of mechanical peeler, the Magnascrubber, tumbles the potatoes on rollers with rubber studs, which removes the skin. Similar tumbling units with variously sized disc-shaped studs are used for peaches, tomatoes, beets and carrots.^[3]